video editing for dummies

[pelham456]

what is the simplest/most basic app for this? generally just want to 1) downgrade the resolution (to squeeze by email/FB size limits) or 2) extract a subclip.

no fancy "modes" or "features" or other junk to confuse things. just "start time" "end time" and "save as...". is that out there?

[gmcbee]

The old version of Movie Maker (V6.1) is availble on the net. Works on Win 7 or lower, don't know about Win 10.

[Oliverfr]

You have to be very aware of one fact: there are only very rare circumstances in which you can avoid having a loss in video quality.

Allright? That's because any process of re-encoding does just that, it re-encodes. It consumes lots of time, and the process is destructive. Mildly so, or a lot.

If you do NOT mind this, then I would whole-heartily recommend you Handbrake ( http://handbrake.fr/ - wait, it's French?!? wtf).
You can very easily use the easy to understand program options, in terms of destination format, size, and all.
And there is a rather well hidden function to only choose to export the section you want of a video into a new file, it is, in the line with Title: Angle: Range: Duration, you click the dropdown list with Chapters, replace it with Seconds, and then manually enter the beginning and ending timestamps that you will have noted beforehand.

If you want non-destructive copy-and-paste of a section of a video (which you can always feed later to Handbrake if you want to make use of its superior re-encoding capabilities that are so easy to use), then you may use these programs: (a) for .wmv, AsfBin (I tested that one, it works it exports as .asf but renaming it to .mp4 didn't cause any issue with readers or recompressing programs) and MpegStreamclip (http://lib.washington.edu/media...er_s_Guide.pdf), or (b) for .mp4, MP4Split (http://mp4joiner.org/en/), which I tested to work although I can't say I found the interface intuitive.

[alexora]

MPEG Streamclip, a free app, allows the user to resize, reduce the bitrate, extract segments of a clip, and also export to a different format.

You Tube

You Tube

You can get it here:

http://squared5.com/

[pelham456]

some of the downloader apps let u choose which of many bitrates to snag a (youtube) vid in. even diff formats. what exactly is going on here? not all vids offer all options, so it's not like the app is converting things on the fly. do YT vids inherently have DIFF VERSIONS bundled within them, and the DLer is just deciding which one to PLUCK OUT?

also, many of them call downloading "converting". i don't get it. converting is converting; that's over and above what i'm trying to do, isn't it? but no, the downloading itself seems to be called converting. are YT videos inherently FLV or something and simply saving them as MPG/MP4/AVI is itself some sort of "conversion"?

back to bitrate, if the DLer offers diff bitrates/sizes to DL something in the first place, why do i need s/w to resize the one i have? should be some simple kind of "toggle" in explorer itself to downsize a file on the spot, no?

puts me in the awkward postition of tryna DL every single size/version offered to me..."just in case". i mean, i WANT the one with best resolution/highest bitrate, but at some point i may want a lesser version to send via email/FB. which will be a lot harder to "create" after the fact than if i had DLed it as such to begin with.

no?

[OddBa11]

In regards to YouTube, many have multiple resolutions. Sometimes 2, sometimes 5 or more. You can see this yourself by going to a video, click the little gear in the lower right, and select quality. I just checked a music video and it had every standard resolution from 240P (144, 240, 360, 480, 720, 1080, 1440, 2160).

Also, in regards to your JD topic, you can set JD to always capture only the highest quality version. Or leave it at default and it will add them all to LinkGrabber and you can delete the ones that you don't want (or keep them all).

[jjjukemdzz]

i use avidemux - for almost anything not wmv, it allows extracting a subclip without recompression as long as you follow the rules - clip from keyframe to keyframe.

[ww345]

a few free programs to consider:

Lossless Cut - http://mifi.github.io/lossless-cut/

LosslessCut aims to be the ultimate cross platform FFmpeg GUI for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitle and other related media files. The main feature is lossless trimming and cutting of video and audio files, which is great for saving space by rough-cutting your large video files taken from a video camera, GoPro, drone, etc. It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data without doing a slow re-encode and thereby losing quality. Or you can add a music or subtitle track to your video without needing to encode. Everything is extremely fast because it does an almost direct data copy, fueled by the awesome FFmpeg which does all the grunt work.

for YouTube:

3DYD YouTube Downloader - http://yd.3dyd.com/

3D Youtube Downloader is a simple yet powerful downloader from Youtube and other popular video sites.

All popular video sites provide for each clip several files with different qualities (Youtube is the champion here - up to 40 qualities per clip). 3D Youtube Downloader fetches complete list of available qualities and depending on current work mode automatically selects appropriate file to download or gives you an opportunity to do this by yourself.

[XED]

videopad...

[MasterBates]

not sure where to put this seems like a good list and varied and updated every now and then tools for stream recording/editing/ playing videos, etc...

http://fileforum.com/browse/Video-Software